I left an order in to sell at the ask price for several weeks, and the order eventually went through; it went through on PSE, and I was charged about $.70 per option instead of $.25 per option, seemingly saying I was removing liquidity. But why? This was a GTC order, and if anything, I should be getting paid for adding liquidity instead of paying for removing?
2 possibilities: 1) It wasn't a limit order but was, say, market if touched 2) Due to IB "smart routing" the order was not placed on the exchange in advance and in fact not sent to the exchange till it happened to remove liquidity. In any case, it's best to ask IB about that.
1) It was a limit order 2) Are you sure this can be a cause? I.e. if I would have done direct routing with my GTC order on PSE I would have been paid instead of being charged for having used smart route?
"when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" - Sherlock Holmes
you have to explain why there is a forum called "retail firms" on Elite Trader. From my vantage point: some of us are looking for multi-faceted input/ options not necessarily available at customer service.
Forum members can write many pages of posts guessing what happened. The broker actually knows what happens. If you actually asked IB support and got some reply, please post some details of the reply. It will be helpful for anyone with the same problem in the future. The "online chat" is pretty good. Saves potential waiting time on the phone. It's not like it costs money to aks a question. If you are sternly refusing to ask IB support then either the question is theoretical of "what if this happened" nature, or you don't care about the state of your account. If you happened to notice this fee mismatch a long time after the execution (perhaps after IB must be purging their detailed execution logs), it actually gives you credit for checking fees at all. For many trading styles broker fee is the last thing a trader would look for in the execution report.
I think your orinal assessment in right but contacted them anyway to share my thoughts on the matter.
Good choice! This could have been an execution algorithm glitch that they may want to fix. Alternatively, there is always an option to send an order to a specific exchange. The downside, is (I think) such an order will be disqualified from "unbundled" commission structure.